Choosing a Merchant Provider
The next step in the development for both Eventable and 7dots was setting up a merchant account. For any of you thinking about getting a merchant account or wanting to take credit cards online (without using PayPal), just know your not alone if you’re confused by all the details and marketing speak. I don’t need to go into all the details as we’ve already done that but if you can make it through all of it, you’ll feel pretty good about yourself.
I thought I would quickly share who we went with and who else we looked at.
Not knowing much going in, we looked at a few top players like Authorize.NET and Verisign and CyberSource.
Authorize.NET was one company that quite a few people know and talk about along with Verisign. The problem with Authorize.NET is that they don’t allow you to store credit cards for monthly billing through their API. This means we would have to ask users to basically pay each month - which would be incredibly annoying and give us really low retention. You also can’t buy directly from them which made working with them even more difficult. Versign was a pretty good option but a bit more costly as you’re really just paying for the name. Not a bad solution if you have the money - people know and trust Versign. For us, however, it just didn’t make sense from a cost standpoint. Versign also didn’t offer a Payment Gateway so we’d have to find someone else to provide us with that. Not really a bad thing but just a pain in the butt and one more company monthly bill you need to worry about and keep track of.
CyberSource really caught our eye and offered the full package (a Merchant Account and Payment Gateway). They seemed to have their act together by how well they explained the process and their prices were reasonable.
The day before we made our decision however, Dan found someone else and it threw a wrench into our decision. The company he found was TrustCommerce and was pretty close to CyberSource in pricing. The main difference was their attention to developers. They had a variety of programming language stuff already written - which would allow us to possibly save us 1-2 days of coding on our end.
The day we had to make our decision we sat at JP’s Coffee and went back and forth. Both Cybersource and TrustCommerce were great options. We almost flipped a coin but ended up making our decision to go with Cybersource for 2 reasons:
One: They had a with a customer list that includes such Fortune 1000 companies HP, H&R Block, Home Depot, and Nike. TrustCommerce’s clients weren’t as large, but to their credit were great open source clients.
Two: Design. It sounds terrible but Cybersource had a better design and made us feel better about their care for detail and presentation. TrustCommerces website is (to be honest) really crappy and a simple thing like presentation was something that helped make the decision for us.
After applying for an account (usually a few day process), we had our CyberSource Merchant/Payment Gateway account. Their backend interface is great and we can’t wait to finish integrating their API.
One thing I’d like to say to Merchant Account providers directly is - “Make things simpler”. It would be great if you could see the trend in Web 2.0 applications and growing landscape of individual developers trying to work with you. It would be amazing if you even had a impulsive button on your site that said “Creating a Web 2.0 app? Here’s a how to get started with us.”. That would be amazing and by simplifying the process for a growing group of software developers, you’d make some good friends and a stronger community of followers.
louise Says:
Locate it. You`ll be happy
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